Lost Nation (22 page)

“I have.”

“And none seen your man?”

The sheriff shrugged. “If they had, none was in a hurry to tell me.”

Blood said, “A young man with motivation, I couldn’t see him stopping here.”

“I guess not. I thought it was worth the ride.”

“At least,” Blood said, “you had a chance to look the country over.”

Hutchinson paused, showing he understood Blood’s implications. Then said, “No, I expect you’re right. A young fellow like this rascal Gibbs, had that much money, I guess he’d push right on through to Canada. He could travel west up there and come back into the country and no one would know a thing about who he was.”

Blood said, “Or stay right there in Canada. There’s a lot of it, is what I hear.”

“There is. There surely is. Why, who knows? Someday this right here might be a part of it. Not if New Hampshire has a say in the matter, but no one much listens to us. It’s up to the men in London and Washington, I guess.”

“Being here in the middle of it, it’s hard to imagine who would make much effort over it. But then, it’s almost never about the actual place, is it?”

“Sometimes,” said the sheriff. “But not very often.”

Blood nodded. Thinking whatever invention the character Gibbs might be, this short interview was not enough to justify the time spent
hard riding in bad weather—that whatever Mose Hutchinson sought encompassed more than Blood himself.

A week later Sheriff Hutchinson and four men from the Coos militia rode up from Lancaster under cover of darkness and at first light arrested a pitch holder called Watkin up on Indian Stream under a warrant from the Coos County judge for bad debt. Watkin would not go with them and so was clubbed with the barrel of a horse pistol, strapped across the back of one of the men’s horses and led out of the dawn dooryard with blood running down matting in his hair while his wife and children stood watching, listening to the sound of their husband and father coughing and choking on his own blood. His older boy ran then the half mile to the nearest neighbor and roused the man who rode first back to the Watkin house to speak with the wife before turning his horse with the Watkin boy behind him to race to Emil Chase. He reached the mill as the sun came over the hills beyond the lake and spread the still water with a broad path of fire. Chase was grinding early Canada corn. The miller listened and then sent the Watkin boy and his own off to alert neighbors and have them spread the alarm.

By midmorning there were eighty men and youths in disorderly and boisterous assemblage at Blood’s that filled both the tavern and domestic quarters and spilled out into the yard, men weaving their way back and forth through all those clustering so the multitude reminded Blood of a swollen and maddened hive of bees kicked into a swarm but lacking the presence of the antagonist. The Watkin woman had been brought down by a neighbor and she alone was very still, seated at the kitchen table with tea grown cold before her, her hands engaged in her lap, turning over and over as she worked her fingers as if to divine something in the red-blistered digits.

Emil Chase arrived with his wife and stood in the doorway and called out for silence, for order. Then his wife brought Mrs. Watkin to the door and tried to leave with the woman but men called out for her to stay, that they would hear from her. Mrs. Chase surveyed the crowd and did not look to her husband but addressed them all.

“She hadn’t ought to’ve been brought here in the first place. Shame to all of you, those who brung her thus and those who left her so.” Then
the Chase wife raised a hand against protest and finished. “Consider her needs above your own. Put down those cups and listen. She’ll tell you once and not again. Then I’m taking her from this place.” She looked at the stricken woman beside her and placed a broad hand in the small of the woman’s back and moved her up so they stood side by side. Mrs. Chase said, “Tell them, Cilla.”

And the sun-red grief-smirched woman tilted back her head and cried out. “They come and burst through the door with axes and took Paul from the bed. He was in his long underwears. He would not go with them and they was shouting at him and the sheriff had a paper but would not let Paul hold it to read. Maybe he was afeared Paul would throw it in the fire. Or maybe there was nothing about Paul on it at all. The children was crying and the oldest boy Edgar kicked one of the men and that man swatted him down like a bear cuffing a dog. And Paul still would not go and so another one of the men broke his head open with the long pistol he was waving and Paul sagged down and they carried him out the house and strapped him across the back of a horse like a carcass and rode out of there. It was my boy Edgar ran down here with word of it. There is blood, the blood of my husband, seeped to stain the floorboards of the house. He could be dead,” she said and paused. Then said again, “He could be dead. And any one of you could be the next one battered or killed. We been too long without any authority in this country. We’re betwixt and between. What kind of men are you to let it come to this? What kind of men? Just answer me that.”

And Mrs. Chase led her down off the step and through the crowd of men who stepped back for the arch procession of the two bold women and some looked upon her and others dropped their eyes and not one spoke but all stood and watched as the women went up the road through the soft churning dust and sand until they entered the house beside the mill. The men stood, shamed.

Behind the counter in the tavern Blood listened to the woman speak and watched the stiff set of her back and when both women stepped down into the yard they passed from his sight but he heard the silence of the men even more clearly than if they had been raging wild and he thought There, that’s done it, as the click of apprehension that he always paid attention to turned over in his brain. A physical sensation,
the mild disturbance a bat-wing passing close in the dark brings to the cheek. More than what it was. A signal of some kind. One he could not fully read.

Sally came beside him. She said, “What’s going to happen?”

“You watch close, you’ll know as much as me,” he said. “But, I had to guess, I’d say you’re about to witness mankind striving toward the best it can do and most likely failing utterly.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means look sharp.”

“I always do.” She stepped closer so she was just against his side. “You know that.”

He put his left hand on the counter edge and left it there and stepped away down the counter, leaving his elbow out between them. He said, “Here it starts now.”

Emil Chase shouldered his way to the counter and stood across from Blood. He said, “Will you suspend sales while we call a meeting? If not, I’ll make it the first motion.”

Blood surveyed the room. Looked at Chase. “Your motion wouldn’t pass. But you need men sober as can be hoped for. For your goodwill, I’m happy to have your meeting run dry. They’ll drink up after.” And be looking to fill their ammunition pouches, he thought.

Chase said, “I have no goodwill today. The Watkin woman was right—we have no authority to rely upon beyond ourselves. And we have failed.”

Blood said, “Perhaps. It may serve to see it that way.”

“What do you imply?”

“Only that it seems to me that any solution arrived at has the potential to be worse than the problem.”

“The quandary with you Mister Blood is you lack all sense of the brotherhood of man.”

Blood nodded agreement. “True enough.”

“We have no recourse here. We are not the keepers of our fates.”

“Why certainly all men are.”

“The State refuses us right of citizenry. We have thus an obligation to protect ourselves. To organize ourselves.”

“The Watkin man abandoned obligation himself, it sounds like.”

“Perhaps. This does not mean the man should’ve been bludgeoned before his wife and children and strapped like carrion over the back of a horse.”

“I’d guess those Coos men felt they had no choice. They were a good ways from home. It was not that many of them, compared to this group here.”

“If we govern ourselves there will be ways for such complaints to be resolved.”

“You have no authority to govern yourselves.”

Chase stared at him. Then said, “We assume the authority as free men.”

Blood shrugged. “I wish you success, Mister Chase. But not one of us is a free man.”

Chase studied him. He said, “I had no reason to believe you to be a man of God, Mister Blood.”

“I was not speaking of Him,” Blood said, then turned away.

In late afternoon a company of seven men led by Peter Chase and Isaac Cole departed by way of ancient Indian foot-trails for the ten-hour march to Lancaster, carrying with them armament rustic and deadly: a pair of long guns, a single horse pistol holding a double charge, two swords, a sickle, and sturdy ironwood clubs. Each man wore a belt knife of varying quality. They carried also a quickly-scribed copy of the constitution of the newly-made Republic of Indian Stream, as well as a writ issued by the new and duly elected magistrate Emil Chase charging the party of seven to secure the person of Paul Watkin, said Watkin being detained against his will and the will of the Republic. All measures necessary were to be employed and no man was to stand in the way of the party. So help them God.

At dusk there was a thunderstorm which dissipated into a steady drizzle and the men, all young and work-hard, handpicked by the brothers Chase, fell into a steady dog-trot with the lead men calling out warnings against the inclines and obstacles of the trail. They waded through a bog rather than skirt it and came upon Nash Stream and traveled down that along the eastern slope of the escarpment of cliffs that rose above the stream and at midnight came out onto the open road north of Devils
Slide that ran west into Lancaster and they kept that pace until a farm dog barked at them as they approached the village. They slowed to a walk and the drizzle covered all sound of their passing and no more dogs barked although one came out from a yard and trailed after them until one of the men bent for a stone and the dog retreated.

The jail was in the meetinghouse cellar and the front door of that building was shut against the night but not locked. In the dark they went down the stairs and came into a room lit by a guttering candle-lantern. The jailer was asleep with his head down on a table and one of the men tapped him on his nape with a club and the man groaned and spread his arms wide over the tabletop and did not move again. Watkin was awake in the single cell. His face was crusted with dried blood so he looked like an African and one eye was swollen shut. A simple bandage of rough woolsey was wrapped around his head, the cloth soaked through in spots like smallpox. The key to the cell was on a ring on a nail. Watkin was steady on his feet but weak. Cole fed him rum from a clay bottle he carried. Peter Chase unrolled the documents that he’d carried dry inside his shirt, gently lifted the jailer’s head and slid them onto the table and lowered the man’s head back into place.

One of the young men, the one with the horse pistol, said, “Shit. Is that all there is to it?”

Isaac Cole looked at him. “We ain’t home yet.”

There was a pot of cold beans with molasses and salt pork on the table and the men ate it with the single spoon already dug into the beans, passing it turnabout. Then they went up the stairs again in the dark and did not pause at the meetinghouse door but walked out like it was midday and they had just come in on ordinary duty. They went out through the town as silent as they came in. It was like they had never been there. Except each one of them knew it was nothing like that at all.

Once out away on the road they spoke briefly, voices taut with excitement as they moved.

“I’d hate to be that feller when he wakes up.”

“He’ll be out for a while.”

“It’ll still be some knot.”

“I tapped him gentle.”

“It’ll still be a knot.”

“Nothing like the knot the sheriff leaves on him I bet.”

“That sheriff ain’t going to like those papers.”

“They ain’t meant for him to like or not.”

“Still.”

“Watkin. How you feeling?”

“Better now. Some kind of sore though.”

“You believe you can trot a little?”

“If I had to.”

“What I think is, it would be a good idea.”

“Let’s do her then.”

Late that afternoon Mose Hutchinson and a party of men came up the road beside the river. There were a dozen men and they were all mounted and well armed. They turned off the road at Indian Stream and rode the three miles up to the Watkin house which they found empty, with even the livestock gone. They sat their horses in the dooryard and after some discussion three of the men dismounted and fired the house and barn while the other men wheeled their horses about, watching the fields and woods around but it was silent as Sunday. The house caught quickly and burned with hard snaps and clear flame but the barn was full of new-made hay and so was slower to catch and when it did it sent up a roiling glut of dismal smoke and Mose Hutchinson watched this knowing a critical error had been made. But the jailer was his brother-in-law and when they left Lancaster midmorning was still speaking in a gibberish none could understand. They returned down to the Lake Road and realized there were no people at the neighboring farms or new pitches and no livestock in sight either and Hutchinson rode in front of the party with his big roan gelding reined in hard so the horse moved sideways. The dawn had come clear after the night of rain and the air was still and fresh and they could smell hay curing somewhere and heard the raw screech of crows and the lone single bark of a raven answering and that was all.

At the Lake Road they turned northeast toward the mill and followed the river deeper into the settlement. The river ran along the righthand side of the road and although it was late in the year and the water was low there was enough of it moving over the rocks so the sound was a
constant rolling growl against which the hoofbeats seemed to echo as if the country had determined to announce the party.

They came over the slight rise of land that hid Back Lake and saw Emil Chase in his suit of dark wool and his broad brimmed dark hat standing alone in the center of the road. The river here was a jumble of great slabs and blocks of granite and the road was narrow with thick scrub woods along the other side. Hemlocks grew both sides of the road and the light that came here was speckled—a step forward or back could dazzle a man’s eyes. Hutchinson silently swore and sat his horse to a standstill and the party stopped behind him. Chase was fifty yards away. When the party approaching stopped, he reached up and removed his hat and held it down before him with both hands. Hutchinson did not know if this was a signal or manners.